Black-on-Black Hate Crime January 29, 2008

A Maryland family awoke recently to a horrifying discovery: “KKK” and racial slurs, spray-painted on the side of their home, together with a crude spray-painted drawing of genitalia. What would make the crime at the Trotter’s home, however, so shocking was that the perpetrators were not white KKK sympathizers as police had originally believed, but black teenagers.

Cries for hate crime convictions quickly switched off, and black leaders were calling for hate crime investigations “until they learned that [the perpetrator] was black.” The entire case has sparked a debate about hate crime laws which, officials say, are not specific enough or equipped to deal with same-race hate crime.

The Baltimore Sun reports:

On Jan. 20, neighbors found the graffiti on the home of Lorenza and Virginia Trotter, in the 2000 block of Brigadier Blvd. Trotter said the racial slur and “KKK” were accompanied by a drawing of male genitals.

Police said witnesses reported having seen a group of black males flee the scene. A police spokeswoman said last week that the suspects were thought to be a group of teenagers “trying to outdo another group of kids with vandalism. … It was not a racially motivated incident.”

…In some ways, Trotter said, the fact that the suspects are members of her own race is even more troubling.

“I guess you can kind of, well, almost understand when someone of a different race does something like that. You say, ‘They’re sick,’ or something. But when your own race does it, it makes me really angry. The young kids today, they don’t understand that that kind of thing isn’t taken lightly.”

A black restaurant owner in Georgia was blasted for putting up a “racist sign” in his store: “Closed Due to African American Continuous Employee Theft.” Black students at Ole Miss in Mississippi were allowed to continue their studies there, even after writing “obscene and racist slurs” including drawing a noose on some black students’ doors.

While the number of black-on-black hate crimes is small compared to the total, the number did jump slightly from 87 such incidents (out of 3,200 total anti-black hate crimes) in 2005 to 93 (out of 3,136) in 2006 — a change from 2.7% of the total to 3%, a rise of 11% — the Black community especially, and indeed, all of humanity, ultimately, must ask itself why this is going on. (And these numbers are far higher than convicted black non-Jewish-on-Jewish crime.)

Is it really, like Ms. Trotter said, just gross insensitivity? Perhaps the case could be made that stronger black history curricula would be a solution, but simply knowing facts does not necessarily engender the emotional connection that would make a noose taboo for a black man. Perhaps we could say that there is a lack of self-identification with the “larger black struggle” or “global black community” but how would one create this where none exists, or bolster identity floundering to the point of drawing nooses?

(And is this related to Jewish neo-Nazis who try to use anti-Semitism-based defenses in court?)

Should it not be culturally instinctive for black young people to eschew symbols of racism and KKK insignias? Where is the disconnect?